Immigrants! Who Needs Them?

Immigrants appear to be everywhere in America and, according to the two videos we present, this is not a bad thing. The narrator of the first one offers an engaging, well-documented overview of migration movements around the world, the way they are used by politicians, and their fate in the past and present. But he mostly focuses on the good effects of immigration on the US economy.

He describes most immigrants as hard-working adults who pay taxes and contribute in all kinds of ways. For instance, they are responsible for half of all Silicon Valley technical startups, and, he says, nearly half of the 500 largest companies in the US were founded by immigrants or their children. “That’s 216 companies, whose revenues surpass $5 trillion each year and employ almost 13 million people around the world.”

Here is a fact that was not mentioned in the video, one that should really make you embrace immigrants — especially those with medical degrees: There is an alarming shortage of doctors in the US, especially primary care doctors. According to a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, by the year 2025, the US is expected to be 125,000 doctors short.

Yet, it is very hard for foreign doctors to get jobs in the US — no matter how qualified. They must pass a series of difficult exams and do their residencies all over again. But because only 40 percent can get into a residency program, many end up working in non-medical professions.

The second video, put together by CNN’s Sanjay Gupta, shows the sad fate of such doctors in Southern California, where there are thousands of them, mostly Latino: they’re cleaning houses, laying brick, washing windows, trying to remember who wants fries with their burgers, and worse — all while studying for difficult exams that are not in their native language. But, at the University of California in Los Angeles, their American colleagues are mentoring them in an effort to fast-track them back to where they belong — practicing medicine. Good thing, because Americans are going to need them.

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One response to “Immigrants! Who Needs Them?”

Starting in the 1920s the American Medical Association began “influencing” American medical schools to limit the number of doctors they graduate so as to keep up the price of doctors. You can read about this and many of the other ways in which moneyed interests have warped America’s health care in their own predatory interest in Cristy Ford Chapin, Ensuring America’s Health: The Public Creation of the Corporate Health Care System (Cambridge University Press, 2015). And THAT’s why America has a shortage of doctors and why doctors who were not educated in America’s bloated, inflated, predatory system are so much less expensive than doctors who were. This is NOT to blame American doctors, except insofar as they abet the AMA’s predatory anti-health operations (the AMA covered up the truth about tobacco causing cancer for a decade after the American Tobacco Institute gave them a $5 million grant to “fight the specter of socialized medicine” — after all, we can’t have that in America — people must pay top dollar or die). This system abuses doctors as much as patients. Who it serves are the absentee investor class, the 1% of Americans who own over 50% of America and run it for their own benefit. This problem is pervasive in ALL aspects of America and Wall Street and its hireling media and kept politicians do everything they can to keep it that way. It’s not truly “humanitarian” to import people from other countries to keep this filthy system in place. People like the authors of this story are urging us to treat symptoms and ignore causes. That’s not good medicine. Is it that they can’t see straight or that they don’t want to see straight? Who are they serving? American’s who need health care or investors driving by insatiable greed?